COMPOSITE IMAGE: CARINA SIM-SMITH (LEFT); CLEVE HICKMAN AND ANGEL CHIRIBOGA (MIDDLE AND RIGHT)
One autumn day in 2019, Michelle Kelly and Carina Sim-Smith were cleaning out the storage room of the Auckland marine lab where they worked. Among the floor-to-ceiling units of shelves brimming with jars of alcohol-preserved sea sponge specimens were a couple of long-forgotten plastic boxes packed with hundreds of jars. Peering inside, “Michelle was like ‘Oh my goodness. Cleve’s sponges,’” recalls Sim-Smith, a marine scientist at ClearSight Consultants.
Cleve is Cleve Hickman, a retired Washington and Lee University marine biology professor who had collected the sponges nearly two decades earlier during a scuba diving expedition in the Galápagos Islands. He had sent the specimens to sponge expert Kelly in New Zealand, but due to a dearth of funding for laborious identification work, the sponges had gathered dust in storage for years. Now that they’d been rediscovered, Sim-S
Unique Opportunity to Name and Help Save Newly Discovered Species in Galapagos
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The US nonprofit Galapagos Conservancy, Inc. has launched a public auction of naming rights for three new sea sponge species discovered in the Galapagos Archipelago, including one species found at a site visited by Charles Darwin in 1835. WASHINGTON (PRWEB) December 17, 2020 On December 17, Galapagos Conservancy, Inc. launched a public auction of naming rights for three new-to-science sea sponges discovered in the Galapagos Archipelago. The auction is online and offers an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy by naming one of these rare shallow water sea sponges. Online bidding begins on December 17, 2020, at http://www.galapagos.org/auction and will end at midnight on December 31. All proceeds from the auction will go directly to research and conservation efforts to protect the Galapagos marine habitat, helping to save t